Looking for signs: What poetry has to tell us about these times

Sunday

May 4, 2014 at 12:01 AM

Unseasonably cold, and still the blooming trees, the dogwood, the pear, even the plum and cherry: as April turns into May, they are blossoming. This time of year I usually start to feel spring in my bones,...

By Rick Benjamin

Unseasonably cold, and still the blooming trees, the dogwood, the pear, even the plum and cherry: as April turns into May, they are blossoming. This time of year I usually start to feel spring in my bones, but instead I’ve been carrying a kidney stone for a month — a kind of corporeal pull down into the very ground of my body. The constant, middle-of-the-road pain has worn me out.

Despite the fact that I love this time of year, I feel burdened by this small stone in my side, and also by some of what I have lately witnessed around me: the cancers of a dear friend and family member; someone else’s daughter killed in the stairwell of a high school by another student, her friend; a disturbed and traumatized soldier opening fire on a military base; another daughter both missing and beginning to forget the father who has been incarcerated, uncharged, at Guantanamo for most of her life. There are other signs, too, of course, some of them hopeful: college acceptances, graduations, other rites of passage that are both ecstatic and that mark significant absences we are about to experience in our lives. So much love to lose!

In one of my classes at Brown, I ask my students to look carefully around them — at their own lives, the lives of others, at the news, at the whole wild world — and to document what they are observing. At the same time, we look together at two poems by Lucille Clifton, “the times” and “signs,” which first appeared on consecutive pages in her book, “Blessing the Boats” (2000) and again in her “Collected Poems” (2012). I call it the “sign-of-the-times” prompt, which is simply to ask, “What are some of the signs of your own times?” Clifton, as always, is forthright and courageous in the opening lines of “the times”:

it is hard to remain human on a day

when birds perch weeping

in the trees and the squirrel eyes

do not look away but the dog ones do

in pity.

another child has killed a child

and I catch myself relieved that they are

white…

The honesty of these lines always takes my breath away: Clifton’s willingness to check her own biases and reflexes, to unabashedly expose herself, indicates her complicity in this conflicted world she has set out to document. But she cannot rest in her predicament. The future is full of symbols meant to be seen and interpreted:

the cat would hunch across the long table

and that would mean time is catching up,

and the spindle fish would run to ground

and that would mean the end is coming

and the grains of dust would gather themselves

along the street and spell out:

these too are your children this too is your child

Yes, the last line is punctuated by empty spaces, three between words, five between phrases, like downbeats (one-two-three) sounding both realization and resignation: this violence implicates us all and is also and sadly a sign of our interconnectedness. Parsing out differences, ethnic or otherwise, offers little to no solace in such cases. As John Donne said centuries ago, “any man’s death diminishes me/because I am involved in mankind.” In “signs,” Clifton’s inclined even to wonder about the human:

and what does it mean this morning

when a man runs wild eyed from his car

shirtless and shoeless his palms spread wide

into the jungle of traffic into a world

gone awry the birds beginning to walk

the man almost naked almost cawing

almost lifting straining to fly

This poems ends on a note reminiscent of something that the great Czech novelist, Milan Kundera, wrote in “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” after noting that blackbirds had left forests for cities:

“When the blackbird goes against nature and follows man to his artificial, anti-nature world, something has changed in the planetary order of things. And yet nobody dares to interpret the last two centuries as the history of the blackbird’s invasion of the city of man … what we suppose to be unimportant wages guerrilla warfare behind our backs, transforming the world without our knowledge and eventually mounting a surprise attack on us … .”

The unnamed man in Clifton’s poem, of course, wants to fly, wants wildness and wings, what the birds themselves seem to have abandoned earlier in the poem as they themselves “walk” and “stand” and “reject the sky.” It is a world turned upside down or at least topsy-turvy, one that we neglect to read at our own risk. Congress continues to resist reaching consensus on the conceptual space called “climate change,” despite rising sea levels, dramatic weather events, the mass extinctions that Elizabeth Kolbert has documented so well in her most recent work. This, too, is their planet; this, too, is their world.

Yet we walk about as if it belonged, solely, to us.

Every woman’s death diminishes me.

Here is a poem, called “Relationship,” by Molly Kerker, currently a graduate student in the master’s program in public humanities at Brown, her own sign-of-the-times response:

ice smoothed over

sidewalk surfaces

seeped into skin

capillaries crumbling

asphalt to scree.

i walk in the road,

chest polluted, too

late to seal pores

from water turning

into crystals freeze-thaw:

broken marriage.

I admire the deftness and agility with which Molly moves from non-human to human ecologies, finding in the chill air and ground signs of a disintegrating relationship. It’s a tightly wound poem, compressed almost to cracking, which, of course, is precisely the point. Like Clifton, Kerker is willing to witness something many of us might wish to turn away from or overlook, some cold knowledge nestling in our bones. It’s hard work seeing what’s all around us, noticing where both our lives and our world seem to be tending. And it is the work that poetry, at its prophetic and visionary best, always seems to be doing, showing us what might be coming next.